10.21.08
The conspiracy of silence over the Axial Age
The Gurdjieff Con has a discussion of the New Age rejection of modernity, with sidelines on everything from Zoroastrianism to the Kali Yuga Kali Yuga: can we get to the bottom of cyclical myths?
One of the strangest side effects of the study of the eonic effect is the way it indirectly clarifies the confusions in antiquity over cycles of civilization.
We tend to reject all of this out of hand (but it always resurfaces, witness the debates currently over decline), but the simple periodization of the eonic model unexpectedly uncovers the empirical reasons for the confusion, and also shows clearly that, speaking empirically, the ‘new age’ effect is real (with many qualifications, and expressed in a different terminology), and is especially visible in the phenomenon of the Axial Age. This is a tricky subject, but it is possible, quite easy in fact, to restate this issue in terms that can satisfy the strictest scientific demand for rigorous analysis. All we have to do is lay down a detailed timeline, with an associated geographical component, and look at the sudden way the cyclical phenomenon stands out. Whatever the explanation.
This is at first preposterous, but the facts speak for themselves. Nothing like hard facts to kill a theory, here the ‘theory’ that non-random patterns don’t exist.
The idea of cycles should be dropped, and replaced with something more precise. In fact, we should stay very close to the idea of periodization and not attempt premature theories until what we understand what are seeing in antiquity all the way back to the Neolilithic.
In any case, confusion arises because ‘cyclical recurrence’ is confused with ‘progressive cyclicity’. The former is the stuff of the hopeless confusions over cyclical myths. The latter, progressive cyclicity, makes much more sense, and doesn’t propose impossible dynamical gyrations of civilizations, instead amounting essentially to a clocking mechanism of some kind.
We live immersed in cyclical thinking, btw, with the idea of progressive cyclicity realized in our days of the week, and weeks in a month, etc… The progressive cyclicity of Mondays is real, and is not a cyclical theory of cyclical recurrence.
There is another important difference, directed cyclicity: we don’t see cycles applying to a global whole, but only in relation to a series of connected subsets of a larger whole.
In any case, the mystery of the Axial Age stands just behind us, a massive dynamic interval visible to the naked eye, mocking our idea that world history proceeds at random. And there lies the clue to what is eluding us in our attempts to understand the enigma of evolution.
Enigma Of The Axial Age